What Is Infrastructure as Code (IaC)?

With traditional data center infrastructure management, every configuration change required manual action by operators and system administrators. Relatively simple infrastructure tasks require the involvement of multiple teams. These hand offs result in diversified configuration, difficult-to-troubleshoot errors, and outdated documentation. In almost all cases, to address IT problems, we are continually implementing new processes and purchasing or building new tools. These processes create more work and tools that will address some issues, but also cause other problems and increase our Technical debt. It is a vicious cycle.

Most times enterprises fail to achieve velocity at scale.  Automation and scripting alone cannot solve the velocity paradigm. Enterprises need to look holistically at how infrastructure services are created, delivered, and managed. Continuing current practices, such as manual provisioning complicated by different interpretations of imprecise instructions, will continue to lead to "snowflake" architectures and brittle systems. There is a need to modernize, or replace, this existing infrastructure to exploit cloud architectures, implement true platforms, and actualize the promise of cloud.

Infrastructure as code (IaC) is the ability to programmatically manage and provision an entire technology stack through software or code, rather than using manual and complex processes and outdated documentation for configuring hardware devices and operating system components. Just as with application source code, infrastructure configurations can also be treated as pure code. Treating configurations as code provides the same benefits as it does for applications, including version control, automated testing, and continuous monitoring. Treating configuration as code and handling changes through CD pipelines helps prevent ‘snowflake’ infrastructure deployments that cannot be reproduced and ensure that configuration errors never make it to production. With IaC tools, you can provision infrastructure in the most efficient way possible. Infrastructure changes become repeatable processes with fewer errors or defects and minimal manual user interventions. This way it allows Automating provisioning of development, test and production environments and related infrastructure and therefore increasing overall software release velocity.

With IaC tools, you can deliver pre-configured servers ready to host your applications and scale computing dynamically. IaC exposes workflows to the entire team creating transparency and allowing quicker iteration, reduced bottlenecks, and increased flow. It is possible to easily define and clone configurations and make changes seamlessly and consistently. Documentation is always current because it is in the code and stored in a central repository.

There are several tools available to Automate the underlying Infrastructure as mentioned below:

Terraform

Azure Resource Manager

AWS CloudFormation

Google Cloud Deployment Manager

CHEF

ANSIBLE

puppet

Finally Infrastructure as Code Design & Implementation service will reduce the overall time required to evolve an agile infrastructure, using agile development and Systems Development Lifecycle principles, in your organization. Importantly, using configuration code makes changes safer, enabling upgrades of applications and system software with less risk. Faults can be found and fixed more quickly. If your organization is struggling to transform its culture to practice lean and agile processes this service will provide you with real world experience and approaches that will help your workforce cross the chasm to build a cloud-native infrastructure environment. Bottom line is you should be able codify, deploy, and maintain the underlying infrastructure supporting your application.